BARNEY WILCZAK was a curious child, absorbed in natural history and the properties of different plants. In his teens, he was making cider—not your common or garden scrumpy, but a delicate sparkler, using the méthode champenoise and tipping away the results until he achieved something he was happy with.
In his twenties, he worked as a photojournalist, specialising in conservation, photographing rare and threatened botanical species around the world. However, four years ago, working at a biodiversity hot spot on the China-Burma border, he felt homesick. ‘I wanted to be in one place, with my partner, Hannah, and a dog,’ he recalls. ‘I had to find a different way of earning a living.’
Mr Wilczak thought of making eau de vie, a clear spirit produced in eastern and central Europe by distilling fruit. He used Google Translate to pore over textbooks— there was no literature in English—then shut himself in his father’s greenhouse with a small hobby still, experimenting with wild fruits such as rowanberries and sloes.
There was, he reasoned, plenty of topquality fruit grown within a few miles of the Cotswold family home, but he wasn’t sure anyone would buy the results, so he made gin instead.
You might think this wasn’t such a smart move—joining every other Tom, Dick and Harry jumping on the boutique-gin bandwagon of the past few years. However, that would be reckoning without Mr Wilczak’s capacity for taking infinite pains. He went back into the greenhouse to try combinations of 140 different botanicals: ‘I made hundreds of iterations and was aiming for complexity.’
Denne historien er fra September 18, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra September 18, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
